are to be more or less identified with some of those of the several archipelagos, many of which, in the time of the romancer, if not in that of Brendan, possessed halls, monasteries, and hermits.  It may be urged as one of the main objections to this theory that it is almost outside the bounds of possibility that a corach could make such a voyage, but it is perhaps only fair to remark that in the Life, although not in the Voyage, it is stated that after the first five years of the wanderings Brendan returned to Ireland, where, among other things, he went to see Ita, and the narrative then continues:  ’She received him with joy and honour, and said, “O my beloved, wherefore hast thou tried without my counsel?  Thou wilt not gain the Land of Promise borne in the hides of dead beasts.  Thou wilt find it with a ship made of boards.”  So he went into Connaught, and embarked with 60 disciples in a ship skilfully made of boards, and toiled in voyaging for two years; and at length came to the island where he would be.’  This island, however, is only one with an old man dressed in feathers, who calls it ’an holy land, polluted by no blood, open for the burial of no sinner, ... a land like Eden,’ but this seems to be the only Land of Promise which was known to the biographer.

While, however, I willingly make a present of this passage to the naturalistic interpreters, I do not accept their interpretation.  As I have said, I look upon Brendan’s wanderings in the Western Isles soon after his ordination, in search of a place wherein to found a monastery, as the only scrap of historical basis, at any rate as far as he was concerned, which the romance possesses.  The Life says that he reached many islands, but instances only two, one of these being the so-called Land of Promise as above, and the incidents are not of a very startling character.  No one on the other hand will deny that the Voyage narrates a series of incidents of a very startling character indeed, and it seems to me beyond possibility that some of them, such as the Judas episode, can have even a legendary basis, or be anything but pure, unmitigated, intentional, avowed, undisguised fiction, like the incidents of any novel of the present day.  It seems to me that there is in the romance more resemblance to Lucian’s Traveller’s True Tale than is likely to be accidental, and the Land of Promise indeed occupies a position somewhat similar to that held by the Islands of the Blest in that remarkable skit.  Again I think that the Burning Island with its forges, and its monstrous inhabitants hurling rocks into the sea after the voyagers, and the great black volcano piercing the clouds, is very suggestive of Etna and the Cyclopes as described in the Odyssey.  It must be remembered that Greek scholarship was a good deal cultivated in antient Ireland.  My own impression is that the author, whoever he was, was a very pious man, who had read Homer and Lucian, and to whom it occurred that it would be a nice thing